How to undermine Africa’s independent media

The media may be legally protected, but there are still subtle ways for governments to exercise control.

Kenya is the latest government to pull ads, and by extension huge sums of money, from commercial media houses. Credit: Together Liberia/ David Trotman-Wilkins.

National governments remain the single largest source of revenue for news organisations in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, a staggering 85-90% of advertising revenue comes from the public sector.

In Kenya, it’s estimated that 30% of newspaper revenue comes from government advertising. In 2013, the government spent Ksh40 million ($390,000) in two weeks just to publish congratulatory messages for the new President Uhuru Kenyatta.

But with a general election coming up this August, the Kenyan government has decided to stop advertising in local commercial media.

In a memo, reportedly sent to all government accounting officers, the directive was given that state departments and agencies would only advertise in My.Gov, a government newspaper and online portal. Electronic advertising would only be aired on the state broadcaster, the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

It’s difficult not to characterise the withdrawal of state advertising from commercial media as punitive. Without this revenue stream, newspapers are likely to fold.

Worse still, efforts to withdraw government advertising from commercial media can be interpreted as a worrying way to undermine freedom of expression.

Starving news media of revenue is a means of indirect state control. This has been the case in countries such as Serbia, Hungary, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland.

But to fully understand the link between government spend on advertising and media freedom it’s important to take a historical perspective.

How did we get here?

The 1990s saw the adoption of multi-party politics in many African countries. This led to relatively liberal constitutions in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana among others.

But since then, most African governments have grown anxious about their inability to control the local news agenda, much less articulate government policy.

For governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more recently Tanzania, controlling the news agenda is seen as a means to stay in power. Views that compete with the state position are often cast as legitimising the opposition agenda.

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the “ideology of order“. This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nation-building and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post-independence African governments and emphasised through incessant calls for what they liked to call “unity”.

In Kenya, former president Daniel Moi even coined his own political philosophy of “peace, love and unity“. Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally. Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s to 1980s, African governments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent. Opposition was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death. This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

By contrast, the current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards, including the protection of free speech, which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day. Many countries now have institutional safeguards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

But as a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer. It’s against this background the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya can be seen.

Controlling the media purse

In Kenya, the decision to withdraw advertising followed a special cabinet meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advertising spend in Kenya’s mainstream media and directing money instead to the new title.

A similar move was made in South Africa last year when the government’s communications arm announced that it would scale down government advertising in local commercial media. Instead, advertisements would be carried in the government newspaper Vuk’uzenzele. The decision withdrew an estimated $30 million from the country’s commercial newspaper industry.

The South African government also claimed that the move was made to reduce government spending. But critics have argued that the decision was made to punish a media outlet that’s been particularly critical of President Jacob Zuma’s presidency.

In both Kenya and South Africa, the decisions have hit at a particularly hard time for the media industry, providing governments with the perfect tool with which to control the press.

Will a free press survive?

Commercial news media is going through a period of unprecedented crisis. The old business models are unable to sustain media operations as audiences adopt new ways of consuming news.

More than that, mass audiences are growing ever smaller. Newspapers in particular haven’t been able to adapt to the changing profile of the old versus the new newspaper reader.

The effect has been that newspapers are no longer as attractive to advertisers. As such, they have to rely a lot more on state money and patronage for survival.

To sidestep state control, commercial media in Africa must rethink their business models and diversify their revenue streams.

It won’t be an easy road, but non-state media must also work hard to disrupt a re-emerging narrative of “order”. Nation states cannot revert to the dark days when government policy was singular and alternative viewpoints were silenced or delegitimised.

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